Part of the Global Plot to Expose Moonbats, conspiracy nuts, and anti-Semites, especially the Jewish anti-Semitic variety.
The leftwing Neo-Nazi web magazine Counterpunch has described Plaut thus: "One of the most pernicious writers is Steven Plaut, a man who could be thought of as Israel's Daniel Pipes."

Monday, September 10, 2007

About those "Neo-Nazis" the Israeli Media are Upset about:

Unfair charge vs. Israeli lobbySeptember 7, 2007STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley@suntimes.comIt's no secret that the Israeli lobby has a record of success. A number of strongly motivated organizations advocate for Israel, a cause that enjoys the favorable sentiment as well as financial support of American Jews and others. The Israel lobby functions no differently from NARAL, AARP or countless other lobbying groups that exercise the First Amendment guarantee of the right to petition government.Yet, no other interest group is so frequently singled out for harsh scrutiny, as if somehow laboring on Israel's behalf turns out to be working against America's best interests. The latest manifestation of this attitude comes in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard, that is an elaboration on an essay published in the London Review of Books last year.Mearsheimer and Walt concede Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War but argue that our continued support is detrimental to U.S. standing in the Middle East and helps "inspire a generation of anti-American extremists." That's their world view. Forget the dynamics of radical Islamism, Arab resentment of the West and other complexities of international affairs. Just change U.S. policy toward Israel and the world will be a happier place for America. Two intellectuals at two of our best universities have reduced international relations to that.(For the record, their book describes the Sun-Times as one of the prominent newspapers in America that "regularly runs editorials that read as if they were written by the Israeli prime minister's office." I wrote most of the editorials on Israeli-Palestinian issues.)The two go to lengths to try to rebut any suggestion of anti-Semitism in their criticism of the American Israeli Political Action Committee and other pro-Israel groups. But you can't read The Israel Lobby without realizing that whenever two interpretations exist for some action by Israel or its supporters, Mearsheimer and Walt automatically default to the darker view.For instance, a section of their book titled "Camp David Myths" cites numerous secondhand sources to disparage the Israeli peace initiative in 2000 while dismissing the account of Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton's chief Middle East peace negotiator, who was at the center of the Camp David effort and wrote the highly praised The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.But discrediting Camp David is central to advancing Israelphobia. The record is clear that in a breath-taking gamble, Israel was willing to push the envelope in offering the Palestinians the best deal they're ever likely to get, but Yasser Arafat couldn't abandon terrorism for a Palestinian state. That was a historically pivotal event that demonstrated to any reasonable person the clear peace aspirations of Israel.Reading this book reminded me of something that happened in the months leading up to the Iraq war. In 2003 Mearsheimer was one of nearly 1,000 American academics signing a letter suggesting Israel would exploit the U.S. invasion to expel millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- and maybe also Arab Israelis from Israel itself!It was a preposterous notion then and looks even more ridiculous today. Granted, the letter was adapted from one issued by some Israeli academics -- proof of the adage about the ivory tower being out of touch with society. But the view embraced by Mearsheimer displayed a profound misunderstanding and ignorance not only of Israeli society but also of the moral culture of American Jews. The notion that 5 million Jews in Israel would carry out ethnic cleansing of more than 4 million Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and that Americans Jews would sanction it staggers the imagination.To believe that requires a bias against Israel so deep seated that it defies reality. Whether it spills over into anti-Semitism, I'll leave for you to judge.

3. All of the Israeli mainstream media is hysterical this week about a tiny group of so-called "Neo-Nazis," non-Jews who had immigrated from the old Soviet Union, in Petah Tikva. I strongly suspect that they are less neo-Nazis than they are street punks and guttersnipes, sort of some other Israeli adolescent slimeballs who kill cats and call themselves the "Cult of Satan." In other words, they are obnoxious teenagers badly in need of a spanking. See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3447377,00.htmlBut be that as it may, why the sudden concern for Neo-Nazis supposedly running about Israel, but not a word about the Neo-Nazi tenured traitors and post-Zionist academic extremists at Israeli universities, who are at least as anti-Semitic as these street urchins.

'You Have Liberated a People'By FOUAD AJAMISeptember 10, 2007; Page A15Iraq"We liberated the Anbar, we defeated al Qaeda by denying it religious cover," Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha said with a touch of pride and impatience. This is the dashing tribal leader who has emerged as the face of the new Sunni accommodation with American power. I had not been ready for his youth (born in 1971), nor for his flamboyance. Sir David Lean, the legendary director of "Lawrence of Arabia," would have savored encountering this man. There is style, and an awareness of it, in Abu Reisha: his brown abaya bordered with gold thread, a neat white dishdasha, and a matching head-dress. "Our American friends had not understood us when they came, they were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers."We were in Baghdad, and the sheikh gave me his narrative. There was both candor and evasion in the story he told. Al Qaeda and its Arab jihadists had found sanctuary and support in the Anbar; they had recruited the "criminal elements" and the "lowly," they had brought zeal and bigotry unknown to the Iraqis. Initially welcomed, they began to impose their own tyranny. They declared haram (impermissible) the normal range of social life. They banned cigarettes, they married the daughters of decent families without the permission of their elders. They violated the great code of decent society by "shedding the blood of travelers on routine voyages." The prayer leaders of mosques were bullied, then murdered.Abu Reisha and a small group of like-minded men, he said, came together to challenge al Qaeda. "We fought with our own weapons. I myself fought al Qaeda with my own funds. The Americans were slow to understand our sahwa, our awakening. But they have come around of late. The Americans are innocent; they don't know Iraq. But all this is in the past, and now the Americans have a wise and able military commander on the scene, and the people of the Anbar have found their way. In the Anbar, they now know that the menace comes from Iran, not from the Americans."Abu Reisha spoke of the guile of the Iranians: They have schemes over the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, he said. He said the Anbar was in need of money, that its infrastructure was shattered. He welcomed a grant of $70 million given the Anbar by the government, and was sure that more was on the way.An Iraqi in the know, unsentimental about his country's ways, sought to play down the cult of Abu Reisha. American soldiers, he said, won the war for the Anbar, but it was better to put an Iraq kafiyyah than an American helmet on the victory. He dismissed Abu Reisha. He was useful, he said, but should not be romanticized. "No doubt he was shooting at Americans not so long ago, but the tide has turned, and Abu Reisha knew how to reach an accommodation with the real order of power. The truth is that the Sunnis launched this war four years ago, and have been defeated. The tribes never win wars, they only join the winners."Four months ago, I had seen the Sunni despondency, their recognition of the tragedy that had befallen them in Baghdad. That despondency had deepened in the intervening period. No Arab cavalry had ridden to their rescue, no brigades had turned up from the Arabian Peninsula or from Jordan, and the Egyptians were far away. Reality in Iraq had not waited on the Arabs. The Sunnis of Iraq must now fully grasp that they are on their own. They had relied on the dictatorship, and on the Baath, and these are now gone; there had, of course, been that brief bet on al Qaeda and on the Arab regimes, and it had come to naught.The one Baghdad politician with the authority, and the place in the pecking order, who could pull the Sunnis back from the precipice is Vice President Tariq Hashemi. There is a parlor game in the Green Zone, and back in Washington, that focuses on Mr. Hashemi. He is at once in the circle of power, and outside of it, simultaneously a man of authority and of the opposition to this new order. He is a leader of the Islamic Party, and a former colonel in the armed forces. He flirts with the government, promising to stand by it, then steps back form it. His caution is understandable: Three of his siblings have been lost to the terror. He is a man of great polish, his English impeccable. There is an aristocratic bearing to him.He would not call the government sectarian, "I am a man of this government," he said, when I called on him in a villa that reflected the elegance of the man himself. He questioned the government's "performance" and its skill. He pointed to the isolation of the government in the region as evidence of its inability to rule. "I don't question the right of this government to rule. I know I am in the minority in Parliament, I know that they have the largest bloc in our legislature. But ability is an altogether different matter. A more able government would reach an accommodation with Syria, with the other Arab governments and with Turkey. The Syrians may harbor fantasies about the return of the Baathists to power in Baghdad, but they are eager for the benefits of trade and commerce, and their enmity could be eased."It is late in the hour for the Sunni Arabs, but the age of the supremacists among them has passed. There is realism in Mr. Hashemi, and a knowledge of the ways of the world. Baghdad's Sunnis need him, if only because their crisis is deeper than that of the Sunnis of the Anbar.The loss of Iraq to the Persians is a scarecrow. A great, historic question has been raised by Iraq: Can the Shiite Arabs govern, or are they born and eternal oppositionists? For a man at the center of this great dispute, for the storm swirling around him and the endless predictions of his imminent ouster from power, there is an unhurried quality about Nouri al-Maliki. There is poise and deliberateness in him. The long years in exile must account for the patience. He had waited long for the deliverance of his people; the time in Syrian exile must have been dreary. The Daawa Party had been the quintessential movement of the underground, it had suffered grievously, and sons and brothers of "martyrs" fill its ranks. The men arrayed around Mr. Maliki are resigned to their isolation in the Arab constellation of power. They had been forged by a history of disinheritance. Mr. Maliki is not "America's man in Iraq." He had not been part of the American-sponsored opposition groups prior to the war of liberation. He is a man of the Shiite heartland; his peers in the Shiite political class are men of Baghdad, familiar with Western languages and ways. He is through and through a man of his culture, his Arabic exquisite and melodic. He takes in stride the sorts of things said about him by American officials and legislators. He is keenly aware of the debt owed America by his country -- and by his own community, to be exact."We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of appreciation and gratitude," he said. " To them I say, you have liberated a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world, and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us. We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam's endless wars, and we have now come into the light. A teacher used to work for $2 a month, now there is a living wage, and indeed in some sectors of our economy, we are suffering from labor shortages."Though Mr. Maliki had come to power with the support of Moqtada al-Sadr's bloc of deputies in the parliament, he has given a green light for major operations against the Mahdi Army. He walks a fine, thin line between the American military and civilian authorities, and the broad Shiite coalition that sustains him. There is stoicism in him about the dysfunctional cabinet over which he presides; its membership was dictated by the political parties that had picked the ministers. Three groups of ministers had suspended their participation in the work of the government. He would not be bullied, he said, he had lists of highly qualified technocrats eager to take part in a new cabinet; he would stick it out."I don't believe that there is a military solution for our conflicts; we have to rehabilitate the troublemakers. We don't arrest Baathists solely because they are Baathists, and the same must hold for those who belong to the Mahdi Army," Mr. Maliki said.He had courted the notables of the Anbar, he didn't say, but I had been told that heavy subsidies had been made by his government to the Anbar tribal leaders; he had gone to the Anbar with substantial sums that had been paid to the sheikhs. But he looks with a jaundiced eye on arming Sunni "volunteers." He dreads this, and says that this would be a disaster: "We will have come out of a hole only to descend into a deep well." National reconciliation -- the sword of Damocles held over his head by his American detractors -- is not easy in a country "without a history of dialogue and give-and-take. This may require two or three years. Grant us time, and you will be proud of what you have helped bring forth here."The historical dilemma of his country was there for everyone to see: "For the Kurds, this is the time of taking, for the Shiite, this is the time of restitution, for the Sunnis this is the time of loss. But ours is one country, and it will have to be shared."Mr. Maliki recoils from the charge that his is a sectarian government; he notes with satisfaction that Gen. David Petraeus had exonerated the government of that charge. The Mahdi Army had won the war for Baghdad. This has had the paradoxical and beneficial outcome of making that militia unneeded and parasitical. It has given this government a measure of independence from the Sadrists."Historically we are winning." The words were those of Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. This is a scion of Baghdad Shiite aristocracy, at ease with French and English, a man whose odyssey had taken him from Marxism to the Baath, then finally to the Islamism of the Supreme Islamic Council. "We came from under the ashes, and now the new order, this new Iraq, is taking hold. If we were losing, why would the insurgents be joining us?" He had nothing but praise for the effort that had secured the peace of Baghdad: "Petraeus can defend the surge," he said. "He can show the 'red zones' of conflict receding, and the spread of the 'blue zones' of peace. Six months ago, you could not venture into the Anbar, now you can walk its streets in peace. There is a Sunni problem in the country which requires a Shiite initiative. The Sunni problem is power, plain and simple. Sunni society grew addicted to power, and now it has to make this painful adjustment."Mr. Mahdi was not apologetic about what Iraq offers the United States by way of justification for the blood and treasure and the sacrifice: "Little more than two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanon War of 1982, the American position in this region was exposed and endangered. Look around you today: Everyone seeks American protection and patronage. The line was held in Iraq; perhaps America was overly sanguine about the course of things in Iraq. But that initial optimism now behind us, the war has been an American victory. All in the region are romancing the Americans, even Syria and Iran in their own way."For the Sunni-ruled states in the region, he counseled an acceptance of the new Iraq. He looked with pride on his country, and on his city. He saw beyond Baghdad's daily grief. "Baghdad is the heart of the Arab world, this was the hothouse of Arab philosophy and science and literature."Peace has not come to Iraq, the feuds have not fully burned out, but the center holds. The best of Iraq's technocrats, deputy prime minister Barham Saleh, spoke of the new economic vitality of the provinces, of the recovery of regions once lost to darkness and terror. I brought back with me from Iraq a reminder that life renews in that land.I attended the judicial tribunal that is investigating the crimes of Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better know as Chemical Ali, and 14 other defendants being tried for deeds they committed back in 1991, in the aftermath of the first American war against Saddam Hussein. Chemical Ali had been one of the most dreaded "roosters" of the regime, a haughty killer. His attire was either Western suits or military uniforms. On the afternoon I went to watch his trial, he had shuffled in, leaning on a cane, all dressed in the traditional Arab way. The courtroom setting was one of immense decorum: a five-member panel of judges in their robes, the defense team on one side, the prosecutors on the other.A lone witness, his face hidden from view behind a simple curtain, told of the cruelty he had seen a generation ago. He told of Chemical Ali executing people point-blank, after three Baathist women singled them out; he told of the burial of the victims on the grounds of a vocational school. He stood firm, the simple witness, when Chemical Ali tried to bully and ridicule him. He had no doubt about the memory of that day. He recalled Chemical Ali, he said, in his olive military uniform, and he correctly identified the rank of Chemical Ali. A policeman distributed bottled water to the defendants who once literally owned and disposed of the fate of this country. They were now being given the justice denied their victims.In our fashion, we have our very American "metrics" and "benchmarks" with which we judge this war and the order in Iraq we had midwifed. For the war's critics, there can be no redemption of this war, and no faith that Iraq's soil could bring forth anything decent or humane. Today two men of extraordinary talent and devotion, our military commander and our ambassador, will tell of the country they know so well. Doubtless, they will tell of accomplishments and heartbreak. We should grant them -- and that distant country -- the hearing they deserve.Mr. Ajami teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," and is the recipient of the Bradley Prize. URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118938716117822176.html

5. The seditious New Israel Fund gets some new megabucks from teh Ford Foundation to help undermine Israel's existence:

The Ford Foundation gave its second $20 million grant to the New Israel Fund.

Ford announced the grant to the Israeli civil rights group on Thursday. The New Israel Fund has spent some $200 million dollars over the past 28 years to fund organizations that promote democracy and human equality in Israel. Its primary causes in recent years have been rights for Israeli Arabs, women and the poor.

This Ford Foundation gave another $20 million grant to the Fund in 2003, creating the Ford Israel Fund. The Ford fund has three stated goals, according to the NIF Web site: Promoting civil and human rights in Israel, promoting equality for the Palestinian minority in Israel and promoting a peacful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has financed 40 organizations.

.The New Israel Fund is intensely gratified by the renewal of our partnership with the Ford Foundation,. said Peter Edelman, the NIF chairman. .Our combined expertise and shared commitment to the values of social justice has had a tremendous impact on Israeli civil society..

(One can only imagine how many millions it will take to undo the NIF's damage!)